Dive Brief:
- Following a weeklong IT outage at the Library of Congress, the organization’s new CIO says he plans to modernize the organization’s aging infrastructure, reports FCW.
- Bernard A. Barton Jr. joined the Library of Congress as the first full-time CIO in three years on Sept. 8.
- Barton says he’s currently reviewing an interim strategic plan for IT at the Library.
Dive Insight:
A March 2015 report from the Government Accountability Office called out five major weaknesses at the Library of Congress, including information security and privacy. Barton said he is aware of the problems and plans to take steps to fix them. The Library’s recent weeklong outage was attributed to an equipment failure during a restart following routine maintenance.
“We are taking active steps to make sure that this specific type of interruption doesn't happen again, and we are going to be addressing the infrastructure issues that from our side of things contributed to the issue,” Barton said.
Barton previously served as CIO and deputy administrator of the Defense Technical Information Center.
Data storage is a huge challenge for the library. Barton says he plans to examine a number of options, including cloud, on-premise data centers and off premise storage.
A study released by the GAO yesterday found that the federal government’s five-year push toward cloud computing and data center consolidations appear to be working, having saved $3.6 billion so far.
